As a result of their operations, many companies and government-operated facilities produce an effluent that is potentially hazardous to the environment. Federal, state and local governments have passed laws and ordinances regulating such effluent to protect the environment from contamination. Consequently, these companies and government-operated facilities must often perform analytical tests on the effluent and report the results to the government agencies. However, there is no standard manner in which to report to the various government agencies.
Additionally, methods and procedures for performing these analytical tests are often based on the reporting format selected for dissemination to the government agencies. Therefore, manual management and control of the tests are often required to conform the test results to the desired reporting format. Also, conventional systems are usually compartmentalized into separate and sometimes incongruous analytical review and reporting systems, resulting in complicated interfacing schemes. Thus, there has been a long standing need in the environmental testing community, as well as in laboratory communities performing these and other tests, for methods and systems which are more efficient and provide easily producible conforming reports.